Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

I thought I'd posted this earlier, but apparently I wrote this review back on G+, so here it is now from an archived copy: ------ I originally looked into The Day Star by Mark Geston simply based on the awesomeness of it's cover (depicted) but it took quite awhile before I finally got around to reading it recently. I probably should have managed to fit it in a long time ago though, since it is such a short work. The book might fit, if awkwardly, into the dying earth genre of fiction (certainly it's world weary enough to make the cut). And while reading I kept seeing elements and flashes of other better known books, though I get the sense there's no direct influence involved. The cosmology bears some similarity to King's Dark Tower setting: a multi-world universe shaped by powerful human technology of old which tried to bend the world to human will and is now in disrepair. Although not a perfect correlation, the weakening of the universe's boundary which occurred...

Nate Treme's In the Light of a Ghost Star  tabletop RPG is about humans of the far future, whose ancestors fled to Mars during the Sun's red giant phase.  Now that the Sun has entered its white dwarf phase, they return to Earth to scavenge ancient items of interest among the weird things inhabiting the now dark planet. Since I've been thinking of running this game at some point, I was reading over it the other day and realized two things which seemed to be lacking, so created a supplement of optional rules to cover them: Social Stat The game grants three character abilities which are couched as professions but treated as attributes or similar stats: Fighter - For combat and most other physical feats. Explorer - Mainly for sneaking and perception. Scientist - Most other forms of analysis, knowledge and technical expertise. These seem a fairly elegant combination for each character to have, but the definition was extremely brief in the original documents, and didn't co...

Been listening to a bunch of Librevox podcasts of Murray Leinster 's (William Fitzgerald's) work. The tone varies quite a bit among his works, but the stories often seem to follow the trope of speculating male protagonist inventively resolving problems to the delight and frustration of love interest and/or fellows. The Forgotten Planet is no exception. It takes place on a planet incompletely terraformed due to administrative error, where the highest form of life is amphibian, and giant fungi and arthropods dominate much of the wetter lowlands beneath a constantly overcast sky. Events of the story take place 40 generations after a ship crash lands on the world, a time at which the survivors' descents have been reduced to a pre-stone age existence with almost no social structure by the brutal nature of survival among terrifying giant insects and spiders. The plot involves the protagonist and his loosely knit band managing to improve their lot in life during a surprisingly...

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Starship Yesterday I finally got around to running a session of John Stater's Tales of the Space Princess for my wife, daughter (10) and son (8). Although my son lost interest about a third of the way through (sitting still was not going well), in other regards it was probably among the best games I'd ever run. My wife laughed probably the hardest I've heard in a quite awhile. Player characters had been generated months in advance.  They included: Chedna   a Human Psychic (Wife) Star Llama a Llamoid Alien Scoundrel (Daughter) Fire the Freeze or Freeze the Fire  a sentient,  chair-sized,  burning block of ice, also a Star Warrior (Son) The scenario itself was created as an afterthought to a pirate base raid adventure I'd written notes for earlier.  But after detailing how the pirate scenario would run, I realized it might be best to have an earlier scenario to establish some key setting details and ...

Watching a bunch of the remastered Star Trek original series episodes and a couple of the movies really got me missing the early days of the franchise, with it's earnest optimism for humans and our institutions, and strong sense of curiosity and wonder in the face of the unknown.  Which, of course, made me long to capture the experience somehow in RPG form. Far Trek and Where No Man Has Gone Before  would seem to be good starting points for someone with avowedly "old school" role-playing inclinations such as myself. But for some reason I found myself gravitating to John Harper's Lasers & Feelings , maybe because I thought something simpler might be easier to rope my kids into playing. But Lasers & Feelings has a bit of a tongue-in-cheek feel to me, and leans slightly more story-game than I would hope. Also it lacks a certain amount of focus on the flavor-details I love from the old shows. Fortunately though Harper released Lasers & Feelings through a ...